Negro troops are raised, and, true to his principles and to himself, he resigns his commission to take a lower rank in a colored regiment.  Now the scenes grow dim, confused sounds far off disturb him, low music, familiar yet strange, now distant, now at his very ear, attracts him, a weird, shadowy mist encloses him, concealing even the things which were visible to the mind’s eye, and memory and thought have almost ceased.  Yet while all else fades away, clear and beautiful before him are two faces that cannot be forgotten—­his mother’s face, and that other, which he loves, if that can be, even more.  Thus, with the ‘Our Father’ not on his lips, but fixed in his mind, he feels himself drifting away—­drifting away like a boat that has broken its moorings and drifts out with the ebbing tide—­whither?

But the rich, warm, lusty blood of the African quickly does its work.  The heart, which had almost ceased to beat, because there was not blood enough for it to contract upon, reacted to the stimulus, and as it revived and sent the new life pulsating through all the body the whole man revived, and again: 

The fever called living burned in his brain.

Fournier, under one pretext or another, but really by the force of his relentless will, kept his victim by him for years after their escape from the South.  He noted from time to time certain curious changes that took place in his physical nature, and recorded his observations with scientific precision in a book kept for the purpose, for the renewal of life had entailed results of an extraordinary character, as the reader may have already anticipated.  At length he wrote ’My hypothesis is verified, it has become a theory.  My theory is proved, it is a physiological law. Climatic influences, acting upon man, bring about physical changes exceedingly slowly, because they are resisted by an inveterate habit of assimilation which pertains to the blood.’

That day Shirley was free.  His rescuer had finished his experiment.

Alice Wentworth had never believed that her lover was dead.  She had heard all with a troubled heart, but while his distant kinsmen, who were heirs-at-law, put on the deepest mourning and grew impatient of the law’s delay, she simply said, “I will wait until there is some proof before I give him up!  Proof! proof!  Shall I be quicker than the law to give up every hope?” And in her heart she said, “He is not dead.”  Even when years had passed and the war was over, and her agent had searched everywhere and found no trace of him, she did not cease to hope that he would yet appear.  So, when at length a letter came, it was welcome and expected.  Not surprise but joy made her start and tremble as the old familiar superscription met her eyes.